EC Staff Are Complaining About Their Teams Backup. They Should Probably Worry About Bigger Things.

You would think the European Commission had announced mandatory cold showers and a ban on biscuits. The actual news: the EC is standing up a self-hosted messaging platform as a contingency, in case Microsoft Teams becomes unavailable. That's the whole story. A backup. Like the spare tyre in your boot that you hope you never need.

And yet, Politico found EC staff willing to go on record calling Element 'absolute shit', with one particularly switched-on individual warning that the US would 'instantly win the war' if it ever pulled the plug on its tech exports to Europe.

Sir. That is the entire argument for doing this.

If Washington decided tomorrow to cut European institutions off from American cloud services, whether through political spite, executive order, or some late-night Truth Social post, the disruption would be severe. This is not a theoretical concern anymore. Ask Kimberly Prost, a Canadian ICC judge who found herself abruptly locked out of Microsoft services, Google, Amazon, and apparently her Alexa unit, as apparent retaliation for the court's actions. That happened. To a judge. In a Western democracy.

Now scale that up. Imagine things go sideways in the Baltics. Russia is already testing borders and nerves with monotonous regularity. If the geopolitical temperature spikes and Washington decides to play favourites, what happens to American SaaS dependencies in Tallinn or Riga? Nothing you want to find out about mid-crisis.

So yes, having a sovereign fallback for internal communications is not hysteria. It is basic continuity planning.

To be clear about what is actually happening: the Commission has deployed Element Pro on its own infrastructure. An internal memo described it as a backup channel for messaging, calls, file transfers, and project collaboration. Teams stays as the primary platform. This is not an EU-wide Microsoft purge. Nobody is being forced off anything permanently. It is a fallback, not a revolution.

Element is built on Matrix, an open, decentralised communications standard that supports end-to-end encryption, self-hosting, and interoperability with other Matrix-based systems. The sovereignty argument here is not really about where a company is headquartered. Element is British, after all. What matters is that the EC can run the thing on its own servers, under its own control, without depending on Microsoft's cloud staying cooperative and available.

An EC memo from July put it plainly: the goal is 'greater control over our data and systems so that we can reduce risks and limit disruption to our work, wherever possible.' That is not corporate waffle. That is a reasonable infrastructure objective stated clearly.

As for the complaining users, this is not a novel phenomenon. Nobody likes switching tools. Nobody liked switching to Teams either, if memory serves. These things have a way of becoming invisible once people get used to them. The same outrage greeted Lotus Notes in 1990, and every groupware transition since. Six months in, the fury tends to evaporate.

Element's own take is measured: sovereignty-focused IT decisions are being driven by leadership and technical teams, while a subset of end users resist change. That's basically the story of every enterprise software rollout in history.

The real question is not whether Element is as slick as Teams out of the box. It is whether the EC can afford to have its entire internal communications infrastructure sitting on infrastructure it does not control, operated by a country whose political reliability has become genuinely unpredictable. Framed that way, a backup starts looking less like an inconvenience and more like the minimum sensible precaution.